Lost

July '98

The following were lost:

A collection of 78 rpm records and albums: Al Jolson, Hoagie Carmichael, Harry James, Benny Goodman, Spike Jones, Danny Kaye, Sophie Tucker, Molly Picon, Menasha Skulnik, and Ben Bernie ("Why Buy a Cow When Milk Is Cheap?" and other Yiddish favorites); "Tubby the Tuba," "Peewee the Piccolo," "Peter and the Wolf"; many more. A collection of trading cards smelling of bubble gum, with pictures of baseball players of the 1940s and '50s, including Ted Williams, Bobby Thompson, Joe Dimaggio, Eddie Stanky, Preacher Rowe, Jackie Robinson, PeeWee Reese, Pete Rieser, Harry the Hat Brecheen, Gil Hodges, Duke Snyder, Richie Ashburn, Roy Campanella, Carl Furillo. A collection of early comic books: Tales From the Crypt, Mandrake the Magician, The Phantom, Archie, Jughead, Batman and Robin, The Origin of Superman, Mighty Mouse, Heckle and Jeckyl, and others. Color-plate illustrated editions of Grimm's and Anderson's fairy tales; a collection of first editions, fiction and nonfiction, from the 1930s and '40s; a set of ledger books, belonging to my father, containing records of the national bookings of feature movies produced by RKO and Paramount Pictures in the 1940s. Newspaper clippings, most of them from Variety, chronicling his career as a motion picture executive, as a theatre owner, and finally as a crusader against the monopolistic practices of the major movie studios (including his own), against block booking and the lockout of independent exhibitors from first-run films, with an account of his testimony before a congressional committee; his sterling silver and sapphire cuff links, his silver and star sapphire ring; his gold-framed eyeglasses, his tortoise shell-framed glasses; a Ronson cigarette lighter, a silver cigarette case, a gold Dunhill cigarette lighter; ash trays from the Latin Quarter and the Copacabana; his gold Bulova watch; a Dunhill pocket knife. A closetful of tailored suits and topcoats and overcoats; a door of English shoes; a rack of silk ties; a fedora, a skimmer, a pith helmet, and a white air-raid warden's helmet with a blue triangle insignia; a gas mask. An autographed photo of Humphrey Bogart; a signed post card from Roy Rogers. Notes from Lionel Trilling and from Gabe Paul, owner of the New York Yankees. A love letter from my father to my mother, mailed from Hollywood the year before they married, burned along one edge, still in an official brown Post Office Department envelope, accompanied by a note explaining that it had been pulled from the wreckage of an air mail plane that had crashed. Her diamond engagement ring and her wedding band. My grandmother's rolling pin, her chopping board, her telephone dialer. A catcher's mitt; a Rawling's Stan Musial fielder's mitt, saddle-soaped and broken in to perfection; a Johnny Mize first baseman's mitt; a regulation major league baseball with the autographs of the entire 1949 Cincinnati Reds baseball team. Softball bats, stickball bats, a hockey stick, all very carefully taped, various skate keys, a suede bag of marbles. A Bakelite radio; a forty-five caliber bullet; a board game called Around the World with Henryk Van Loon; a set of German-made chrome drafting implements in a leather and blue-velvet case; a pair of tiny magnets in the shapes of Scottish and West Highland terriers; a gold signet ring with my own initials. An apartment full of art deco furniture, lamps, and framed Erte-like pictures. Perhaps even an original Erte. Every decent photograph ever taken of the brown-and-white mongrel dog that my mother got me the year after my father died, when I was nine. An envelope containing a tuft of hair clipped from him on the day he died, sixteen years later. All of this and more, gone.

Some of these items were stolen in burglaries, others were given away or merely lost, misplaced, entrusted to the untrustworthy, left behind when the trunks and the moving trucks were full, or carelessly, perhaps even maliciously, tossed by feuding relatives into the...